Roger Marolt: You want positive? I'm positive Base Village is a failure

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I think the most underrated thing about negative people is that oftentimes they are right. Of course, the cause of this lack of recognition is cheerleaders. They call you negative. They claim you don't have spirit. They say if not everyone cheers we will lose. End of discussion, please leave the gym. It's easier than a cartwheel on Astroturf.

The funny thing is most cheerleaders don't have anything to cheer about themselves. In fact, some of the best cheerleaders fluff their pom-poms for atrocious teams. Good teams find satisfaction in winning. It's the bad ones and their fans that need the extra motivation to get out there and take another pummeling.

You wouldn't think that this effort to encourage the courageless would be a bad thing, and it wouldn't be, except that we give cheerleaders big horns to yell through. While they're hollering "shish-boom-ba" through gigantic cones, the fans actually watching the game can't hear themselves think while the players have a hard time concentrating.

Of course the loyal fans get discouraged in irritation against the backdrop of an endless onslaught of cheering by the desperate-to-be-popular squad with ultra-white teeth and megaphones, yet, these very people who are charged with keeping everybody psyched up and who are the root of the fans' discomfit to begin with, are the ones who label these beleaguered fans as "negative."

"We've got spirit, yes we do, we've got spirit, how about you?!"

Nope. Not really feeling it just now. Thanks for asking.

All right already, I'm negative about Base Village! It's not a well-kept secret. Thanks for somebody finally noticing!

Sure, I'd be a lot easier to take every week if I sat down and wrote 800 words of assurance on how great the hardly-new-

anymore Base Village is going to be. But guess what? I would have been dead wrong every single week for the past 10 years. Eventually I might be right, but probably not for another 10 years, at least. That would make a total of 1,040 weeks worth of blabbing about the great potential for this colossal failure of a money grab-and-go, just so that eventually one day I could write a single "I told you so" column. Not worth it!

I'm negative about Base Village, but at least I'm consistent. And you know what? I, and a lot of other local people who were paying attention, screamed into the din of the cheerleaders that this Base Village was a bad idea from the get go. Guess what that means? We told you so!!!

And the cheerleaders will say that this is all nonsense and that there is no way that anyone could have foreseen this disaster. But, somehow we did. Give the negative people a little credit! We

didn't have crystal balls. We had common sense. It wasn't Nostradamus; it was more like Know-the-dumb-asses. We may not have gotten every detail about the utter failure of this plan right and even we didn't know it would be this awful, but we did know it was too big, too quickly, at the hands of too few players. We told anyone who would listen what a bad deal this was going to be for our little town, and now it is.

So, the leader of the pep squad is fired up because the new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss developer now says they have a top-drawer, top-secret new plan that can't

be revealed just yet because of

a double-secret "confidentiality agreement" with the same bank they've barely finished giving it to in the shorts, one that is really going to knock our socks off when it can finally be revealed at some unspecified date in the future, while we fans in the cheap seats scratch our heads. To us it looks exactly like the same team as the detestable losers that they put out there last time, only poorer. Why would we expect a different result? I mean, come on. Right now I envy Cubs fans.

Don't worry about me. I am actually an upbeat guy. I smile a lot and laugh a lot more. I'll give you my seat on a crowded bus. I'm not a picky eater. The truth is that I simply can't muster much enthusiasm about raising Base Village from the dead at a second-

homeowners' seance/pep rally in Town Hall. I don't care. I would say that makes me apathetic, but if the cheerleaders want to call it negative, so be it. Their cheers never made sense anyway.

Roger Marolt is going to skip the next pep rally in favor of a bike ride. Send your ideas for a Base Village parade float to roger@roger@maroltllp.com.